Co-Learning in Community-University Health Research Partnerships: A Southwest Alaska Case Study

Abstract

As theorized in the context of community-engaged health research, co-learning is based on an uninterrogated presumption that learning and change occur equally for community members and academic researchers. In practice, however, co-learning is often enacted (when it is enacted at all) as a unidirectional flow of expert knowledge from researchers to communities. Community members enter into an always-already powered setting in which dominant modes of academic socialization and ways of being and knowing constrain the range of possible interactions. Researchers may fail to recognize community members’ expertise and bids to share their knowledge, resulting in missed learning opportunities as well as dignitary and relational harms. Using a combination of quantitative ethnography, discourse analysis, and descriptive thematic analysis, this dissertation explores co-learning in a longstanding collaboration between Yup’ik community members and an interdisciplinary team of university-based health researchers.